Author Clay Johnson finished his new book, The Information Diet, after a month of intense focus. The "super secret weapon" that got him to done? Slow bandwidth.

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Johnson wrote his book away from civilization, tethered to a bad connection on an already slow EDGE network, and in the process learned to love the productivity uptick that resulted from slowing his broadband mainline to a slow data drip. Here's how he did it:

As soon as I got back to civilization, I tried to find ways to emulate that slow bandwidth. There are a lot of new tools available for slowing down your bandwidth. This discussion on HackerNews. There's Slowly App ($3.99 USD, OS X) that sits in your menu-bar and allows you to throttle your bandwidth whenever you'd like. For the OS X proficient and those with the free OS X Developer Tools, there's also Network Link Conditioner which does the same thing. On Windows, there's NetLimiter, and the cross platform charlesproxy for those of you on Linux.